Storage monitoring with PRTG
To avoid storage problems or failures negatively impacting your business, make sure you monitor all storage components 24/7
with a solution that includes all features required for monitoring the entire data storage process.
PRTG keeps monitoring simple, while ensuring performance, clarity and ease of use.
Storage has always been vital for IT
Today, as IT is the basis of almost every company’s business processes, and with digitalization and big data, storage has become critical for every business. Failures can not only have a fatal impact on business success, but even small performance issues can cause serious problems. This applies to a NAS in a small company as well as to huge SANs in enterprise environments.
What is cloud storage?
There is a new dimension of storage becoming more common: Cloud-based storage. Whether it’s simple file sharing using Office 365 or Dropbox, cloud-based content delivery networks (CDN) or big data applications, cloud storage is everywhere. And the principle remains the same: you want to ensure you don’t lose your cloud-stored data.
Storage issues cause business problems
Many aspects of your business can be affected by storage issues. Let’s look at some typical scenarios:
Data loss through hardware failures
Even smaller storage systems today have multiple layers of redundancy based on RAID levels and multiple disks. Nevertheless, failures happen, and cooling failures can lead to synchronous destruction of multiple disks and to irreversible loss of data. In larger storage systems, which can handle the loss of multiple disks without urgent problems, such failures cause performance issues and can lead to data loss on a long-term basis. Faulty hardware must be replaced in time to assure maximum performance and reliability for the entire system.
Data loss through software issues
The availability and performance of modern storage systems depend mainly on software components, while the hardware is often redundant. Although it’s generally easy to discover hardware failures, it’s much more complicated to recognize data loss due to software problems. Modern storage systems from vendors like Lenovo, QNAP, Dell, or NetApp are complex applications consisting of many components and layers. Small errors could remain undetected until they have become critical failures that cause massive data loss.
Not only storage systems have impact on data integrity: backup software, databases, and, of course, virtual infrastructures play a vital role on the software side of data storage.
Business impact of performance issues
Critical issues are not only caused by data loss based on hardware or software failures. Even small disturbances of a storage system can have a massive impact on overall business performance. Critical business processes could slow down because data is not available or can’t be stored in time. As a consequence, a purchasing process in a web shop might fail, a backup process might be interrupted and thus corrupted, or a security update might fail and leave open vulnerabilities (just to name a few examples).
Secure your business by monitoring your storage with PRTG
To avoid negative business impact due to storage problems or failures, all storage components must be monitored, 24/7.
This means monitoring hardware as well as software, and availability as well as performance.
Of course, most components of modern data storage have their own monitoring system included.
But, looking at the above list of critical components, it quickly becomes clear that one central monitoring solution
is required to get the entire storage system with all its elements and tools in one central overview.
This solution has to fulfil some main requirements:
Monitoring of hardware
Quite clear and easy: The system must be able to monitor the status of a physical disk, as well as its temperature, fan status, CPU etc.
Monitoring of storage systems
Dell EMC, NetApp, Lenovo – a monitoring system should offer out-of-the-box support for the most common storage vendors, and also include the flexibility of creating custom integrations for other systems quickly and easily.
Monitoring of IT infrastructure and performance
Switches, firewalls, servers, databases, virtual hosts and many other IT components play a vital role within the entire data storage process. A holistic monitoring solution should also include features for a general overview about your entire IT.
Monitoring of cloud storage
As mentioned above, storing data in the cloud is vital. The monitoring solution should also give insights into the most common cloud storage providers.
“We start managing the existing infrastructure to determine bottlenecks. Sometimes it is CPU, I/O or code-based problems. By using PRTG, we can save clients from making bad decisions, saving headaches, time and money.”
Jon Berry, President and Owner, Green Olive Tree
PRTG Network Monitor: Storage monitoring and more
With PRTG, Paessler offers a comprehensive monitoring solution including all features
required for monitoring the entire data storage process.
Dedicated storage monitoring
PRTG includes a wide range of predefined sensors (monitoring entities) for monitoring the most common storage systems like Dell EMC, NetApp, HP, Lenovo, Synology, QNAP or even a Buffalo TeraStation™. This also includes sensors for monitoring physical and logical disks for those systems. For cloud storage, PRTG has out-of-the-box sensors for services like Google Drive, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox.
Hardware and IT monitoring
PRTG includes native sensors for almost every hardware and software component in classic IT environments. From switches, servers, CPUs and fans to databases, backup-tools and virtual hosts. It can monitor availability of those components as well as performance and traffic using all common monitoring protocols.
More than just storage monitoring
PRTG can monitor the entire path data takes from the source application to the final disk, folder or database that it is being stored on or in. All features, from traffic monitoring to server, hardware, database or virtual monitoring, as well as monitoring of actual storage devices and applications, are included in every license of PRTG.
PRTG alert system
With PRTG, you can define thresholds to warn you before an outage occurs. You decide how to receive such alerts: Via email, SMS, push notification, or otherwise. The notification feature provides huge value for those on call – they will immediately see where the issue lies, and if the issue has been acknowledged by the responsible party.
Create innovative solutions with Paessler’s partners
Partnering with innovative vendors, Paessler unleashes synergies to create
new and additional benefits for joined customers.
Combining their tools to a powerful solution for advanced analysis and automation, KnowledgeRiver and Paessler enable IT teams to ensure best performance for their infrastructure and networks.
KnowledgeRiver
“Easy to implement and configure with good technical support.”
R. v. S., ICT Manager at Heinen & Hopman Eng BV
Get more deep-dive information here!
Would you like to discover more about storage monitoring?
Then be sure to check out our related blog posts and webinars.
HCI, Nutanix and visibility with PRTG
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How we saved 10 terabytes of disk space using Windows ReFS with Veeam (Including Script)
…and how we monitor our whole backup environment with PRTG Network Monitor.
PRTG WMI Disk Health and Storage Pool Sensors
PRTG has two sensors, based on WMI (Windows Measurement Instrumentation) that allows you to monitor the status of individual hard drives as well as the status of a storage pool.
“For years we have been using PRTG in more and larger environments. Again and again, we have confirmed our decision: PRTG proves to be the ideal solution for monitoring all the data centers we operate and maintain daily.”
Ronald Kok, CEO at All IT Rooms
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